I personally find entire areas completely flattened to the same level aesthetically unappealing. Excuse me if that's not what you guys are aiming for. You could also do a more terraced approach if the hill is an issue. You can build walls on angled ground as well.

Of course angled walls are potentially more vulnerable due to height differences.

Any ways that's pretty rad that you guys are making a keep, keep posting screenshots if you don't mind I'd love to see how it all comes along!

@mvrck@m!ttens hey, shoot me an invite to your server. i want to see if i can get this running on a surface pro. if so, i can help on the weekends by being a forester/fletcher/archer/guy that works with wood

I have done a lot of digging the past few days.. and I just have one thing to say.

Theres no way the current elevation is going to work. There's just going to be too much dirt to move and deal with.

If there is any way to remove the foundations for the walls and such that have been laid, I would strongly recommend doing that and raising the 26.5 area higher, possibly to 36.5 or more.

This will solve the problem with the terrain in the area being higher than the walls, it'll reduce the amount of dirt that has to be moved, and it'll make the castle sit higher and thus be more prestigious. Bonus's all around

You know how I said I was going to wait until this was a little further on before buying it? Turns out I'm a big fat liar with poor impulse control. Can you create separate characters on different servers? Because its unlikely I'm actually going to be able to play with any of you outside of the weekends (Eastern Aus tz) so I'm probably going to want to play on an Aussie server, primarily, but I'm also eager to help out with building a big fuckoff keep if that's what we're doing on the group server.

You know how I said I was going to wait until this was a little further on before buying it? Turns out I'm a big fat liar with poor impulse control. Can you create separate characters on different servers? Because its unlikely I'm actually going to be able to play with any of you outside of the weekends (Eastern Aus tz) so I'm probably going to want to play on an Aussie server, primarily, but I'm also eager to help out with building a big fuckoff keep if that's what we're doing on the group server.

We can always use more strong backs to haul material or move earth!

Our goods production village is solidly built, and can provide any finished products we need (provided the appropriate tradesman is online or available). It can also shelter us in the (unlikely) event that we get attacked.

The potential for this game is really large. If they manage to get all the bugs ironed out, and the features implemented, it will be loads of fun.

My exploratory mine to hunt for granite in the nearby mountain has finally hit rock.

Now begins the arduous journey of mining 280 rocks, turning htem into shaped rocks, dropping them into a pouch, mining 280 more rocks, turning them into shaped rocks, dropping them into a pouch, mining 280 more rocks...

Me caveman. Me find roots and grass. Me find rock. Me make axe with rock. Me make saw, but no can saw log without gather bark for a while. This seem rather arbitrary. Anyway, me eventually saw log into boards and figure out how to make fire, so me consider this a successful play session, ooga booga.

If this game is accurate, it appears as though the feudal ages were extremely laggy. Can't complain about a lack of players in my timezone though; it seems as though there is a very active server in the Aus TZ. I was too scared to approach any settlements in my short time playing, but there were 40 people on the server and plenty of buildings scattered around, so there's probably a community or two for me to participate in / pillage once I get a little better.

So how easy are wild chickens to find, exactly? Is seems as though my dreams of being a hermit ranger type making my own bows and ammunition may have been prematurely squashed by the fact that I'll need feathers to make arrows, and those can only currently come from chickens afaik.

@Mr Ray: 1. I would really recommend against the lonewolf ranger/hermit idea, unless you plan on making a lot of alts. Getting anywhere meaningful past stone tools absolutely requires you to interact with other people. Every trade is dependent on another trade at some point in their tech tree. This isn't an accident, this is an intentional design choice to encourage group play, or at least social interaction.

Want leather armor? Need a farmer.
Sword? Blacksmith AND a farmer.
A home with a lockable door to live in? Gonna need a builder, a herbalist, a lumberjack, a farmer, a carpenter, and a blacksmith.

2. Chickens require you to build a snare, and to place it on a tile with animals tracks via the "look for animal tracks" interaction. Be aware that it will only tell you if there are NO tracks, not if there are some; so nothing means tracks. Then you wait, sometimes upwards of 2hrs, for the trap to snap up. Open the trap and you check what it is, either rabbit or chicken. You can choose to slaughter the animal or place it in a coop for breeding purposes (farming skill). Your best bet is to trade animals to a farmer for his feather output.
3.@theArcadians: Bad news, the sloped walls are NOT fixed. They only work on slopes facing one of the cardinal directions. Keep terraforming is still underway, but the sloped walls wont be raised until they fix that bug.

Just want you guys to know that Arcadia is still a thing. Current focus has shifted to setting up a farm/ living community so each guy has their own lockable home. I would like to have one of each of the farm buildings up in anticipation of those features being added.

Additionally, I would like to discuss setting up a multiphase plan for how out next settlement will develop. A "build order" if you will.

Well the game currently crashes for me if I sprint for more than a couple of seconds, so I think maybe my initial reaction that I should wait until development is a bit further on was the right one. With the loading times and frequent crashes, I don't really consider this to be in a playable state right now.

That's unfortunate. They certainly have a long way to go! I will say one thing tho, the dev team are pretty quick at fixing bugs. The first week after release and you couldn't play for more than 45 minutes without a crash. Most times your client crashed in 15-20. It's an alpha after all. It just kinda sucks, because the potential is already there for it to be something different.

The people I know who played it, along with myself, all quit (just to be clear, I wasn't with the people in this thread, they may still play). That said, we got our money's worth in the first week.
It's fun, it's got potential but it is alpha, it is early access and all that entails.

I kinda think the mmo is where it will shine. The issues we encountered were mainly due to the server setup, of crappy admins or funky settings. A game like this needs stability because everything you do requires a lot of work. A proper mmo server setup would provide that a lot better.

The mmo is a long ways off though.

What I'll say is that it isn't buggy in the sense of encountering lots of glitches, having weird stuff happen, having things disappear and that sort of deal. The only real technical problem I encountered were the crashes, and those got to a point where they weren't very bad. The server browser was probably the second biggest annoyance, but easily circumvented. Gameplay itself was quite fine though. Everything worked rather well when I played.

While I think the game could use a little bit of anti griefing measures, I don't especially like the way they're going about it:

Will allow you to designate “friendly” and “others”. Most important, it will protect your guild land AND objects from griefers. Objects and buildings that are placed entirely inside claimed land will be protected from being used by anyone except your guild members. That feature provides a solid base for further development of decay and “Judgement hour” systems (see below).

The world setting will allow for world admins to set a certain hour during real life day as a Judgment Hour! During that hour all alignment penalties no longer exist! You can kill everyone on sight, without being afraid of alignment consequences. Claims protection will also be void, so it is ideal time to raid your neighbours. Be sure to be prepared for that outbreak of crime and violence ;)

This makes it sound like the only way to mess with other people's stuff is going to be during a very particular hour, set by the admins. There's multiple problems with that, from corrupt admin perspective (set it where it's most convenient for them, change it at whim, etc). But from a gameplay point of view I think it also kinda cuts a lot of the risk/reward aspect out of the game.

There does need to be something to prevent you from just going and tearing up your neighbor's stuff, but raiding and stealing was a large draw of the game. Their alignment system seemed to play into that, and I'd rather see something similar to Salem than what the above seems to indicate. In Salem, you create a plot and pay taxes to maintain/expand it. Anything in the plot is protected, but with a series of skills other players are able to perform actions on the plot such as stealing or destroying. This has consequences, leaving criminal scents/tracks that the player can use for finding/getting retribution. There's a bit more intricacy to it all, but the idea is that you create a relatively safe patch of land but that other players are still perfectly capable of raiding/stealing/destroying if they want to risk the penalty.

It seems to me it would have been much better to just go along those lines. You go and grab your neighbor's loom or loot his chests? You take a hit to your alignment.

Having your stuff wrecked sucks, but it's also one of the driving factors of what makes the game fun. I mean, you know what's supposed to protect your stuff from others? Walls. There were issues with that, glitches to go over etc. But those should be addressed, not a catch all protective barrier mechanic.

We had a lot of fun getting those walls up and dealing with the invaders for a week or so before it all bore out that they were scummy gmbuddies. Had it been actual players, we would've came out ahead in that and it would have been amazing.

This basically takes away the latter but leaves the former and just condenses it to one particular time instead of whenever they happened to be online.

I didn't know how badly I wanted this game. Sounds like it's still a bit broken though.

I believe it's been mentioned in this thread, but I'm not sure this is really a viable long-term game unless you have a really reliable server admin or they finally create the larger MMO version.

Because the real crux of these games is that everything you do takes ages, I can't imagine putting that investment in only to have it be undone by somebody flaking out on keeping the server up. Also, with the ability to change the world around you, you need a little more world to work with as the game continues beyond a point. The small map size and server limits put a cap on the potential of the gameplay and environment.

But make no mistake, this game is something I believe the market sorely needs to be done correctly. A Wurm Online that isn't in a janky Java engine.

I didn't know how badly I wanted this game. Sounds like it's still a bit broken though.

I believe it's been mentioned in this thread, but I'm not sure this is really a viable long-term game unless you have a really reliable server admin or they finally create the larger MMO version.

Because the real crux of these games is that everything you do takes ages, I can't imagine putting that investment in only to have it be undone by somebody flaking out on keeping the server up. Also, with the ability to change the world around you, you need a little more world to work with as the game continues beyond a point. The small map size and server limits put a cap on the potential of the gameplay and environment.

But make no mistake, this game is something I believe the market sorely needs to be done correctly. A Wurm Online that isn't in a janky Java engine.

More than that, is the corrupt peeps that just want them and their friends to be gods on servers. So they give them extra shit, move things around for 'em, make things hell for anybody else so they can be terrors without any repercussions. We put a good three weeks into one server before we found the gm and his buddies and it just killed my desire to play.

We need to organize a PA server if no one has done so yet. I wonder how much interest we could get for this. I just bought the game and am enjoying the hell out of it, just no one to play with and I don't feel like taking my chances on pub servers all alone just to get ganked.